Chapter 4. Configuring email
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Chapter 4. Configuring email

Table of Contents

4.1. Creating a new mailbox
4.2. Additional Email Configuration
4.3. Testing a new mailbox, via webmail
4.4. Configuring email clients

Before you start this chapter

  1. Connect to your server via SFTP (see Chapter 2, Connecting to your server with FileZilla and SFTP).

This chapter deals with configuring email for a domain, namely setting up mailboxes to receive email. The Symbiosis system makes this very simple, as the process of creating a new mailbox, or email account, is a simple matter of creating a few files and directories.

As with our previous examples we’ll be using the my-brilliant-site.com domain for demonstration purposes, but you should substitute your own domain.

Again for example purposes we’ll be demonstrating the creation of a new email account, for the user "bob", which will correspond to the email address bob@my-brilliant-site.com - you should change the name "bob" to the username(s) you desire.

4.1. Creating a new mailbox

It has been assumed that the first few steps in Section 3.1, “Hosting a web page using your own domain” have been followed, i.e. that a directory has been created under /srv/ for the domain my-brilliant-site.com.

  1. Start FileZilla and connect to your machine.

  2. Then right click on the /srv/my-brilliant-site.com/ directory and select Create directory from the menu. Set the new directory name to be mailboxes and press the OK button.

  3. Repeat this step to create the directory mailboxes/bob which makes a mailbox for the address bob@my-brilliant-site.com.

  4. Use a text editor such as Notepad to create a file password on your desktop machine which contains a secure password.

  5. Under Windows a .txt extension will be added to the filename which is not wanted. So before you upload the file use FileZilla to rename it from password.txt to password. That is done by clicking with the right mouse button on the file in the lower right hand pane, and selecting Rename from the menu that appears.

  6. To upload, right click on the filename and select Upload from the menu, making sure that the directory /srv/my-brilliant-site.com/mailboxes/bob/ is shown in the Remote site: text area.

That is all that is needed to set up a new mailbox. To test we can immediately use the webmail application, SquirrelMail, supplied with Symbiosis.

4.2. Additional Email Configuration

We’ve seen in the previous section the basic steps required to configure a new email account upon a domain. For most users this is all the configuration that is required, however an advanced user might wish to take advantage of some more optional configuration.

Forwarding Email

If you would prefer to have emails to a new address sent on to, create a file named /srv/my-brilliant-site.com/mailboxes/bob/forward. In this file just enter the name of the account that mail should be forwarded to; this might be something like dave@example.com.

This file can do many other things than just forwarding email, as explained in its reference section.

Scanning email to prevent spam and viruses

Symbiosis comes with in-built virus and spam detection, however it is not enabled by default. There are two principal aspects to this, namely

  • The use of SpamAssassin to scan each email to determine if a message is unwanted;
  • The use of ClamAV to detect viruses in emails.

Each of these is configured separately, on a per-domain basis, giving choice as to which preventative measures are applied to your email.

Using SpamAssassin to detect and reject or tag SPAM

Email can be rejected or tagged, based on its SPAM score determined by SpamAssassin. This is not enabled by default, but can be enabled in much the same way as the blacklists above.

The default action is to reject, i.e. bounce, email that is determined by SpamAssassin to be SPAM. This can be changed to accept all email, but tag it with a header field to allow users to filter it themselves. This header is detailed in Section 13.10, “Filtering mail using headers”.

To enable SPAM scanning:

  1. Connect to your machine using FileZilla

  2. On the remote directory tree, navigate to /srv/my-brilliant-site.com/config.

  3. On your local machine create a file called antispam. If you want to reject email, i.e. bounce email, that is classified as spam, this file should be empty. If you’d rather accept all email, but tag it as spam, this file should contain the word tag.

  4. Having created the file, right click on it and select upload to transfer it to the remote system. Make sure that the remote file has the correct name, i.e. no extra .txt extension.

Using ClamAV to detect and reject, or tag, emails with viruses

ClamAV is activated in a similar way to SpamAssassin. It can also be set to tag or reject. Again, a header is added to message that has been scanned. This is detailed in Section 13.10, “Filtering mail using headers”.

To enable virus scanning:

  1. Connect to your machine using FileZilla

  2. On the remote directory tree, navigate to /srv/my-brilliant-site.com/config.

  3. On your local machine create a file called antivirus. If you want to reject email, i.e. bounce email that has viruses in, this file should be empty. If you’d rather accept all email, but tag it to show that it has a virus in, this file should contain the word tag.

  4. Having created the file, right click on it and select upload to transfer it to the remote system. Make sure that the remote file has the correct name, i.e. no extra .txt extension.

4.3. Testing a new mailbox, via webmail

Although most users will prefer to receive and write their emails using a dedicated client (such as ThunderBird, or Microsoft Outlook) the Symbiosis system includes a mail client you can access with nothing more than a web-browser.

This section briefly documents using the Squirrelmail webmail system.

  1. To log in to webmail, start your browser and head to http://my-brilliant-site.com/webmail.

  2. Enter your email address in the Name field, and your password in the Password field.

  3. Click the Login button, and assuming the Name and Password fields were correct, you will be presented with your Inbox where you can read and send email.

4.4. Configuring email clients

The following details might be needed when setting up a mail client to use an email account. The user of bob@my-brilliant-site.com on the machine example.vm.bytemark.co.uk has been chosen for these worked examples.

It is recommended that all communication with the mail server is conducted over encrypted connections, either using SSL, or TLS.

Incoming email can be collected using either the IMAP or POP3 protocols. IMAP is generally recommended over POP3 as it can handle folders, push notification, can selectively download message parts, and the email remains on the server enabling back-ups to be made.

Outgoing email is sent using SMTP. It is good practice to send any outgoing email via the Symbiosis server, rather than any relay service provided by your ISP.

For both sending and receiving email, the following login information would be used.

Username
bob@my-brilliant-site.com
Password
(contents of /srv/my-brilliant-site.com/mailboxes/bob/password)
Server name
example.vm.bytemark.co.uk

The default ports are used for all protocols. For further details see Section 13.1, “Port Configuration”.

It is common for Internet service providers to block the standard outgoing email port, i.e. port 25. If your email client complains that it cannot connect to your server on this port, then port 587 is provided as an alternative.

Push notification

The IMAP server fully supports push notification, which is useful for immediate notification of email arrivals.

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